CUA Alumna Hits the Big Stage

By Maria Rodriguez

Since graduating, Bridget Grace Sheaff, Drama Class of 2014, has kept a busy schedule conquering the drama world one production at a time. This weekend she will add the line ‘has been an Assistant Director at Spooky Action Theater’ to her list of accomplishments with the opening of The Collaborators.

As an undergraduate, Sheaff was an aspiring director. Having directed shows here at Catholic University, in Cape May, NJ, and throughout the DC area, Sheaff can not really be classified as an aspiring director anymore. Now, she is working her way through learning more deeply the type of theater she wants to be a part of.

How does she go about this artistic self-adventuring?

“Sometimes I email artistic directors whose work I’ve seen” said Sheaff. She asks them what it is like to run their style of theater company, takes in what they say, and thinks about how she would like to run her own theater company. It is a constant learning process, plus reaching out to these artistic directors is a great way to network. After all, the theater world is based on connections.

“It’s who you know, you know?” said Sheaff, knowingly. Her habit of reaching out to artistic directors paid off, it is where her current job came from.

She contacted the artistic director of Spooky Action Theater and he wrote back asking if she would be interested in helping him out with a show the following year. That show was The Collaborators. The job offer was taken, but after reading the script, Sheaff was fully sold.

“There is no way I can’t do this show. It’s so important,” said Sheaff after finishing the script.
Sheaff says what initially drew her to Spooky Action was the size of the theater’s season, they do a relatively small amount of shows each year, which is exactly the scale of a theater she’s looking to be part of. Spooky Action also does a fair bit of magical realism and chooses plays with a lot of depth, according to Sheaff. The benefit of these characteristics of the theater company is that they pursue something other than just “apartment drama” – the type of shows that take place in a static location and feature people going in and out over the course of the day. Sheaff puts it better in her own words.
“They do the structure of plays that American theater is doing, the thing theater is doing different from film or T.V., Spooky Action looks at what is inherently theatrical in the content of the structure of the play,” said Sheaff.

As assistant director Sheaff has been involved in the process from the beginning. They started casting the show in August and with 14 total cast members, four women and ten men, the show is considered large by professional theater standards. Part of her duties as assistant director is to take notes during rehearsal. Doing so keeps track of the director’s thought for the end of rehearsal when the actors gather to hear the notes. The director can then, using Sheaff’s notes, give detailed critiques on the actors’ performances or remember what he wanted to change. She also serves as another eye in the room, speaking up when something works or does not work.

“Some of it is shaping the smaller moments of the play so [the director] can focus on something bigger,” said Sheaff. For example, Sheaff was asked by the director to help tell the story during a banquet scene. There is a large amount of the cast onstage, and to help bring the whole stage to a vibrant life, Sheaff was tasked with ensuring that there was a life taking place onstange with the ensemble in the midst of all the logistical movments.

As for what is next, Sheaff says she is booked until July. Our own Annalisa Dias-Mandolay from OCA will be directing a show in the second week of March which Sheaff will be directing at the Mead Theater Lab at Flashpoint. Catholic University alum, Kiernan Magowan, co-runs the theater company We Happy Few at which Sheaff will be producing Chalk an adapatation of Bertolt Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle. This summer she will also be directing a full-length production, Static by Tom Horan, at the Source Festival at Source Theater. She will be the youngest person to ever direct a full-length production at the Festival.

“It’s crazy that at 22 they’re like, here’s a new play, cast some actors,” said Sheaff about her upcoming gig at Source. We couldn’t agree more.